


studies on isolationism

by sunflower_8



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Depression, Loneliness, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Minor Mentions of Eating Disorders, Minor References to Rape/Non-con, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, Unresolved Emotional Tension, vent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflower_8/pseuds/sunflower_8
Summary: with his knees tucked to his chest, he allows the tips of his toes to skim the salt water, hoping idly that a jellyfish comes and delivers a fatal sting. it’s what he deserves, to counter the good fortune of being able to come to such a wonderful place so often. at least he deserves to be pinched by a hermit crab today, or maybe trip on the slippery walks and get his feet tangled in seaweed and impale himself, again, on something sharp. then, he couldn’t walk. or maybe-- he hugs himself in a breathy kind of excitement-- the tide can recede quickly, and then he’ll be wiped out in a-“komaeda.”his tremors stop, or at least lessen to something less violent. more… disappointed.(or, komaeda keeps finding new places to hide, and hinata keeps finding him.)
Relationships: Hinata Hajime/Komaeda Nagito
Comments: 13
Kudos: 202





	studies on isolationism

there’s a place just off the beach, similar to a cove, where the waves crash against rocky ridges instead of littered sand. hermit crabs and starfish find their way to the shoreline, sometimes, before they get taken by another tide, the water imaginably cold against their hard shells. it’s more private than the main beach, simply because it’s a walk from the cabins, only to reach a location that is a bit uncomfortable, but cool against the tropical heat. it’s more private, because few people choose to seek it out, to be  _ so alone  _ even after  _ everything _ .

this differentiates komaeda nagito from the other ultimates on jabberwock island. after living there together, post neo world, for around six months, most people have found companionship in each other, preferring to be in the company of their friends rather than alone and victim to twisted thoughts. some, like tsumiki, are still isolated, but she attends lunch occasionally, chips in when they have a party, walks around holding mioda’s hand tightly in hers.

komaeda isolates. except, he doesn’t attend lunch at all. his main interactions come from hospital visits with the aforementioned nurse, as well as occasional conversations when he stumbles on the others accidentally. it’s usually a quick exchange-- nobody likes to talk to him, which is understandable, considering everything. he wouldn’t  _ want  _ them to talk to someone as lesser as him.

there is  _ one _ person on the island, however, who isn’t much better than komaeda himself.

(he’s also infinitely superior to him, a collision of complex and contradictions,

and the sole person who can find komaeda, no matter where he tries to hide.)

he sets the thought aside--  _ out of side, out of mind _ \-- and focuses on the waves. with his knees tucked to his chest, he allows the tips of his toes to skim the salt water, hoping idly that a jellyfish comes and delivers a fatal sting. it’s what he deserves, to counter the good fortune of being able to come to such a wonderful place so often. at  _ least  _ he deserves to be pinched by a hermit crab today, or maybe trip on the slippery walks and get his feet tangled in seaweed and impale himself, again, on something sharp. then, he couldn’t walk. or maybe-- he hugs himself in a breathy kind of excitement-- the tide can recede quickly, and then he’ll be wiped out in a-

“komaeda.”

his tremors stop, or at least lessen to something less violent. more… disappointed.

he should have anticipated that his bad luck would be less satisfying. less destructive. less  _ comforting _ . still, he tries for optimism; maybe hinata has come to finally kill him. that would be exciting, a change of pace from how dreary and melancholic things seem to be.

(there should be  _ hope  _ on this island. but, komaeda is a failure, and so even as the ultimates attempt to prevail, he manages to bring them down to the throes of despair. a despicably incompetant servant, really. were they all still under the grasp of that lethal woman with an arachnid smile, he would be  _ punished  _ for this disservice.

he wonders if hinata would ever punish him, in that sense. it must be instinctual, hidden underneath the lens of that flare-like red eye.)

he addresses hinata with a cheerful, “hi, hinata-kun!” and decidedly does not shift to accommodate the space needed for the brunet to sit at his side. hinata doesn’t seem to care, perching himself up on a dagger-edged rock. komaeda briefly allows himself a moment of self indulgence, picturing what may happen if hinata slipped off of it.

of course, komaeda would never jeopardize hinata’s health. he wouldn’t even  _ dream  _ of it. 

but it would make a good point against the stubborn, selfish ex-reserve.

“you weren’t at breakfast,” hinata says casually. komaeda knows how to unravel a question within a statement, has years of experience from being around the person currently hidden in the back of hinata’s mind, someone who he could likely speak to if he knew the right words to say. most of the time, komaeda doesn’t know the right words to say. he’s deceptive, sure, but sometimes-

-he thinks too much-

-and he quivers like a leaf at the end of autumn’s metal-

-and he can’t get a single word out at all.

now, though, they slide off his tongue with ease. he’s not so lost in himself that he’s rendered nonverbal, yet, from the pinpricks of panic that he welcomes with the arms of a forlorn lover, curled under thin sheets with not a single article of clothing protecting him from the wrath of trauma. he can speak, now, and he  _ does,  _ letting out a light laugh. “so i wasn’t. i’m sincerely sorry if i’ve made myself more of an inconvenience than i already am, haha!”

hinata blinks, then huffs. everything gets under his skin, easily, yet very few things appear to offend him. komaeda can rile him up and push his limits as much as he wants, and maybe hinata will cave and throw a few punches, or maybe storm off-- but nothing can make him less bored. nothing can  _ satiate  _ him or the person he was made to be, oh so long ago.

(before the tragedy. before that  _ wretched  _ girl found herself insatiated, like him, chasing after every piece of viscera and innocence she can  _ get  _ before she rips it to shreds and taints it with despair. she’s done it to komaeda, tore into porcelain flesh with bloodlust teeth and sharp nails like some kind of  _ wolf,  _ taking every piece of him until he was left a cavern of nothing. 

in this sense, kamukura izuru is  _ nothing  _ like  _ her _ , because he has only ever torn komaeda apart at the servant’s request.)

hinata flicks a rock into the ocean, and it’s enough to snap komaeda back into the presence. “i wasn’t trying to call you an inconvenience. i was just commenting that maybe you should get around to actually eating something.”

komaeda wraps an arm around his stomach, feeling the press of bruised ribs and concave breaths like it’s something of peace, of comfort. he doesn’t mind hunger, doesn’t mind the feeling of depravity and desperation, because he was  _ always  _ deprived in the heart of despair, and despair serves to be what he has always deserved.

(not that he likes despair. he  _ loathes  _ even the  _ thought _ \-- a world overruled by the ebony tendrils convulsing and creeping, filling every mind with the thought of thrusting a knife into a tell-tale heart, watching corpses bleed upon dusted streets like there’s a fascination in the meteorites of confessions. a body is most honest as a carcass, ugly and raw like every individual in despair-- but this is what someone as disgusting as  servant komaeda deserves.

and, hope always comes after that. it’s here  _ now _ , within a margin, a sliver. it would be so much more blinding if komaeda is dead,

but, even if he tries desperately to hope otherwise, he knows, now, that the only one who can end his life is himself.)

hinata lets out a sigh, and it registers to komaeda that he hasn’t replied to whatever hinata said. it takes a moment to recall the statement, and even  _ then,  _ it’s unimpressive. instead, he looks at the pebbles and the vast sea in front of them, and asks, “can you skip stones, hinata-kun?”

hinata stares at him, slightly incredulous, but this is par for the course.  _ their  _ course, or whatever the messes of communications they attempt to call conversation can be called. whatever the messes of  _ trying to understand  _ can be considered, if they can even be considered anything at all. eventually, he receives the answer, “yeah. it’s a matter of angles and force, how you flick your wrist, how you toss.” komaeda knows him well enough, has studied him enough to know that this is still hinata. even then, the information comes from somewhere  _ else.  _ “it’s not particularly interesting, and it has no correlation to  _ any _ of the shit we were just talking about.”

“i’ve never been able to skip stones,” komaeda lies with a smile. “can you show me?”

with an exasperated sigh, hinata grabs a pebble and presses it into the palm of komaeda’s hand. he only gets a glimpse of hinata’s warmth before his hand is moved, again, to grab a rock for himself. “you need to angle it downwards, about 47 degrees. you aim it down, but you think up when you toss it, so that it doesn’t just plummet. like this,” hinata demonstrates. his words aren’t particularly effective, and the action is so quick that komaeda can’t track it-- he admires the effort, anyway.

regardless, komaeda already knows how to skip rocks. so really, all of this is menial and useless. he doesn’t know why he asked. doesn’t know why he-

-

-tried.

“now you go,” hinata encourages with something that could almost be mistaken as interest. komaeda executes it perfectly, leaving hinata to look at him blankly for a moment before saying, “you already knew how to do it.”

“maybe it was just my luck, hinata-kun!” komaeda chirps in reply.

hinata rolls his eyes. “that’s not- nevermind. back to what we were talking about.”

he bats his eyes, just a bit, and rests his chin on the palm of his hand. “i’m afraid you’ll have to remind me! brain disease is quite nasty on memory recollection.”

“we were talking about how you weren’t at dinner,” hinata says, seeming unsurprised by komaeda’s remark, but he likes to think that he knows the brunet well enough to tell that he’s still thrown off by it. even if he expects it. just that  _ slight advantage _ \- “and i was wondering why you keep trying to find new places on the island to hide. you know i can find you. you don’t even make it  _ difficult  _ to find you.”

“does hinata-kun want a challenge?” komaeda offers, “because i can try to hide a bit better! given, i thought the warehouse a few weeks ago was quite clever.”

“you were having an episode, komaeda.”

“aren’t i always?”

hinata snorts at that, but it’s not out of humor. more out of frustration. maybe, if komaeda squints, out of  _ guilt.  _ “maybe,” he takes a deep breath, and komaeda tilts his head in curiosity. “maybe, instead of running away, you come to me. and. talk to me about it all.”

and, and, and-

-

komaeda  _ laughs.  _

it grows in his throat until it’s the size of ivy, tearing at the flesh, and it’s  _ beautiful  _ like the  _ blisters  _ of hinata’s  _ kindness _ , his  _ selflessness _ , but hinata is so  _ selfish  _ because- because- and he’s laughing and it started so  _ suddenly _ , these  _ giggles  _ filling his lungs with an ocean of debris like the one he is facing, and  _ he is the debris _ and  _ they are crashing _ and it hurts his chest how hard he clutches at it, and hinata isn’t doing  _ anything _ , just staring at him with a terrified kind of pity in his eye while komaeda  _ laughs  _ and  _ laughs  _ and  _ laughs _ -

-

-“c’mon.”

komaeda barely registers how his laughter stopped so abruptly, like the ending of a life (at the hand of a  _ god _ ) and tears are streaming down his cheeks, but hinata holds his hand out. komaeda hesitates, hesitates, accepts it, and still hesitates even as they walk all the way back to the cabins, the walk seeming almost facile prior with how his legs shake now.

his head is foggy and his chest hurts with the pangs of not being alone anymore, and he wants to fight as hinata allows him to share his bed, but he doesn’t because it’s  _ warm  _ and he can just wake up at dawn tomorrow and escape, anyway. against his skin, hinata is scalding in all the ways he has never wanted, and the thought of having a companion to fight through despair with is so  _ frustrating  _ that he almost wants to rip through his skin to prove everything wrong.

but hinata holds his hands down, looks at him with a mixture of concern, boredom, and exhaustion, so komaeda submits to the sinking sense of  _ i want to be alone i deserve to be alone i deserve to be a  _ **_rotting corpse_ ** _ i deserve- _

hinata whispers, “good night,” and komaeda can’t say a word.

he doesn’t fall asleep, even when hinata does. he watches with half-lidded eyes and a hazed over mind, so so  _ exhausted _ , as the other lets out little breaths and snuffles, holding komaeda closer in the embrace they found themselves in, legs intertwined. there’s an eyelash on hinata’s cheek, and komaeda can’t verbalize a single thought or even  _ move _ ,

so he watches hinata quietly, a litany of  _ i deserve, i deserve, i deserve  _ in his head and-

-

-the next day, he locates another hidden spot on the island, just past the hospital in the shade of palm trees. but hinata finds him. 

(idly, komaeda is terrified that he always will.)

**Author's Note:**

> hi!
> 
> fair warning, most of my upcoming fics will /probably/ be vents, which is par for the course, but just a heads up. also they will probably be sporadic updates. maybe not? i have some wips i'm working on still, but things have been pretty hard, so there's gonna be some of that. just so you know. sorry. all of this might just not mean anything either because i'm criminally awful at distinguishing if i'm going to be vibing or not but just. yeah all of this was fucking useless actually but i'm not gonna delete it, so use this opportunity wisely to update your files on my mental health. 
> 
> that was a weird joke on my end sorry about that
> 
> this was gonna be a /lot/ longer. uh. then i hit writer's block. so yknow that's just how the cookie crumbles i fuckin guess,, god really had to cuck me
> 
> anyway! have a nice day lovelies
> 
> edit: i think isolationism is actually a political term and not just another form of isolation. well. fuck me. i dont wanna change it. oops.


End file.
